growing community spirit
growing community spirit
The Growing Community Spirit Project
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between
how nature works and how people think”. Gregory Bateson
Project Intention
The intention of the Growing Community Spirit Project is to grow awareness around the need and value of using relational and emergent approaches to addressing the complexity of our rapidly changing world.
This project offers a collective response to the issues of our time by acknowledging that learning to be in complexity is a skill we need to nurture together. It supports us to grow our way of perceiving the interdependence of social and natural systems. This approach goes beyond tackling parts of the problem by recognising the inter-dependent relationships that exist within the whole.
With relationships at the heart of Growing Community Spirit, this project intends to cultivate a culture of resilience, adaptability and inspiration as we connect more authentically to self, others and nature.
Who is the Growing Community Spirit Project for?
This project is designed to bring people from all sectors, disciplines and levels of organisations together to consider questions that lay at the heart of community including adaptation for impacts of climate change, reconciliation and other systemic issues of complexity arising in the community.
It is ideally suited to local government authorities (LGA’s) and community organisations that are open to bringing together diverse community members to collectively sense a relational and emergent approach to addressing complexity.
We use a conversation technology called
The Warm Data Lab
The Warm Data Lab is an innovative social technology developed by Nora Bateson (Bateson Institute) that grounds the systems theory research of her forefather’s, in particular, Gregory Bateson, who observed “the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and how people think”.
Warm data can fill the gap of isolation left and felt by silo thinking and operating. In a rapidly changing world, we need to understand how we can change a system while being in a system – renovating the house while we live in it – Warm Data can offer a way to support the thinking required do that.
What is different about a Warm Data Lab?
Warm Data Lab’s offer a way of collectively listening to and sharing perceptions and stories in small groups across different contexts. This experience offers participants an opportunity to expand and shift their individual awareness of the interdependencies existing in our social and natural systems – a key to opening minds to generative listening and sense-making for more relational and emergent practice.
Warm Data Labs are hosted by International Bateson Institute certified hosts have immersed themselves in the theoretical foundation's of warm data and been trained on how to frame the lab to enliven the living systems theory embedded in the Lab structure.
Collaborators
Meet our Project Facilitator & Lab Hosts
Carole Winfield
Lab Co-designer & Co-host
I was born and raised on Noongar boodjar in the hills of Perth. I have a strong community and cultural development, social impact, reconciliation, and education background now supported by certification as a Warm Data Lab host.
I believe in the inter-connectedness of all living things and believe de-colonising and emphasising relationship to be key to a generative future.
Liz Dare
Project facilitator & Co-host
I grew up on a farm near Wagin which is on the land of the Wilman people from the eastern part of the Gnaala Karla Boodja region of Noongar nation. I now live on Whadjuk country in the Perth hills.
I am passionate about growing awareness and connecting people more authentically to themselves each other and nature through dialogue and other co-learning approaches. My practice is informed by Theory U, Appreciative Inquiry, sociocracy and certification as an ontological coach, collaborative awareness facilitator and Warm Data Lab host. This project is inspired by Sandra Krempl’s research and practice on reviving spirit in corporate systems and a strong desire to bring living systems awareness into how we adapt to a rapidly changing world.
